Grit Lab Report

Hi Keara,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.

Regarding passion you picked Stage 5: I have an interest that is not only enjoyable but also aligns with my personal values .

Regarding perseverance you picked .

As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.

Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.

In week 2, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values were achievement, security, and benevolence.

You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.

When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.

You said your top three talents were analytic, kinesthetic, and social.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to secure internship .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:

Work Smart

In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said apply to internships .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said having a job .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said lazy .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: when i finish my homework, then i will apply to internships .

Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.

And here’s how much you learned

These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in sports .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

In week 8, we discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt embarrassed when receiving critical feedback, and embarrassed when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 9, you reported feeling a lot of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being internship .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.

You describe the habit you chose as Health .

Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .

In one word, you said it made you feel happy .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

Happiness comes from the pursuit
Curiosity "lights up" your brain's reward circuits
Writing about our values helps to put them in perspective
Personality states are phases of your personality that can change depending on the setting
Curiosity makes people like you
plans articulate an intended future plan
Flow is where high challenges meet high skills
biggest obstacle to successful feedback and mentorship is peoples egos
Pursuing long term goals requires managing adversity and failure
The path between situation and response is made through repetition
Nobody has all good days
Team players perceive the emotions of others

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.

Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:

Brandon Wang
I really enjoyed being in a team together for Grit Lab! You always have something thoughtful to say during our group discussions and are a great listener. I liked hearing about your experiences on the swim team, which show a lot of grit. By sharing your perspectives on many topics in this class, you certainly also improved my experience in Grit Lab. I thought your presentation about yoga was pretty fun! It seems like a fairly chill habit to pick up that won't be a ton of work or be too difficult. I liked hearing about how you got inspired by Youtube and also all the different things you've done. I hope you continue enjoying yoga in the future.
Jimin Oh
Keara was always so enthusiastic about our learnings in class. Being surrounded by her infectious energy made me also enthusiastic and excited to learn and come to class. She was always so thorough in class, and watching her be so engaged inspired me to also focus even further and potential other applications of grit. Keara’s infectious energy makes me certain that she will thrive in not only having grit, but also applying grit going forward. I am truly thankful that I got to meet Keara and know that she will thrive in all her future endeavors! Keara’s discovery project was very applicable to me in that yoga was also something that I had been wanting to pick up for some time. Something that was really inspiring was hearing Keara talk about the positive benefits of yoga as well as her takeaways on how yoga could be implemented in small ways. I think that Keara did a great job demonstrating how grit was important to this discovery project, and as such was all the more inspiring. I hope to be able to also start implementing yoga into my life, and hearing Keara talk about the positive benefits as well as what took her to take the leap pushed me to stop making excuses and pick up yoga myself.
Collin Lovelace
Keara is such an example of kindness and dedication. I sat next to Keara for the entire class and I always enjoyed having her to turn to for our many breakout discussions. Keara often came in directly from swim practice, which always amazed me. I can't imagine how exhausted I would be after that much exertion right before a long class, but Keara was so hardworking and unassuming about it. Keara's discovery project helped me understand better her passion for physical exercise, looking for something new to continue after her last season of swim. I really appreciated her perspective that grit doesn't have to be grueling, and the importance of finding time in your day for a healthy habit.

We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please…

Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day…

…remember that progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.